Budgeting With Pivot Tables - The Sequel

Over 1,200 AccountingWEB members read David Carter's first tutorial on budgeting with pivot tables. In the eagerly awaited sequel, Carter goes beyond setting up initial budgets to explain how to add the actuals each month and use Excel pivot tables to report on Monthly and Year-to-Date Actuals versus Budget, plus Variances – both at company and departmental level.

The Formulas function is used to calculate variances between budget and actual. The tutorial then advances to generating standard report formats for Monthly Actuals, Monthly Budget and Monthly Variance, as well as YTD Actual, YTD Budget and YTD Variance.

There are restrictions on how far you can format a pivot table. The tutorial concludes by showing how you can copy a pivot table without the underlying data, then revise its format in any way you want before finally circulating it to management.